The Netherlands
Streetsblog Basics
Self-Reliance Grows in the Utrecht Traffic Garden
In the Dutch city of Utrecht, kids start learning about traffic safety long before they prepare for a driver's license. And they pick up a lot more than just "look both ways before you cross the street."
November 3, 2011
Groningen’s Cyclist Green-For-All
Groningen is the largest city in the northern region of the Netherlands. With 57 percent of all trips in the city made by bike, it has acquired the title "World Cycling City." In Groningen, even the large multi-lane roads have been claimed for safe cycling.
October 21, 2011
Fun Routes to Transit
"Why I Ride" is on hiatus this week. Instead we bring you the latest transit innovation from the Dutch city of Utrecht -- the "transfer accelerator."
July 22, 2011
Dutch Planners School U.S. Cities on Bikeability
In the Netherlands, 30 percent of trips under five miles are by bike.
November 18, 2010
Rage-Free Rush Hour in Utrecht
From Infrastructurist by way of Buzzfeed comes this video of bike commuters in Utrecht. With a population of around 300,000, Utrecht is the fourth largest city in the Netherlands, and has a 33 percent bike mode share. According to the write-up accompanying the YouTube post, this intersection handles "no less than" 18,000 bicycles and 2,500 buses per day.
May 17, 2010
Strict Liability: Civil Law for Civil Streets
Yesterday we highlighted a Bob Mionske column that eloquently lays out inherent biases common in U.S. traffic codes and proposes measures we can take to start correcting them. One of them is strict liability, which generally assigns responsibility for a collision to the operator of the vehicle likely to do the most damage (just as motorists are expected to look out for cyclists, cyclists must look out for pedestrians).
February 9, 2010
Eyes on the Street: Holland on the Hudson
Streetsblog San Francisco's Bryan Goebel attended the NY400 event yesterday, where Dutch Cabinet Minister Frans Timmermans presented Deputy Mayor Robert C. Lieber and NYC & Company CEO George
Fertitta with 200 orange commuter bikes as part of a year-long commemoration of "four hundred years of friendship between the Netherlands
and the City of New York." To mark the 400th anniversary of Henry
Hudson’s arrival, the bikes arrived in Manhattan via
a water taxi on the Hudson River.
May 1, 2009
Bicycle Advocacy TV Ads from the Netherlands
We don't understand a word of it, but in this video compilation from the Netherlands, we see what a well-funded television ad campaign to encourage cycling might look like. Or not. Check out the ad about three minutes in: It appears to show an Al Qaeda operative a Saddam Hussein-like guy on a bicycle with a machine gun strapped to his back chasing three Western politician businessman types. It's probably not the best sales pitch for the US market but you get the idea.
April 18, 2007